KDE Improving !

First, for the uninitiated KDE is one of the many desktop environments available for Linux. Other notable ones are GNOME , wmaker , XFCE.

This blog entry is about an interesting article in LWN(Linux Weekly News) published today, about Usability studies in KDE.

Usability studies improve the quality of GUI and analyze if from the point of view of the user rather than the developer. Most commercial OSes do usability studies on their GUI to improve user WOW experience.

Till now, my general feeling has been that open source applications don't do any usability analysis. As a result they ususally don't have an intutive UI inspite being rich in features. The features will ususally be hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered by the user ;-) [ Just my thought, no flames needed]. Or in case of applications that have a good UI, they are generally based along the same UI design and apprearance as the commercial version.

So today I was suprised to find that there is an OpenUsability movement which aims to brings together open source developers and usability experts so as to improve the quality of open source applications.

It is good news that some thought has gone into these aspects keeping the general user's interest in mind. This is a welcome sign to all Linux users. So with improvements in KDE and other open source applications we can soon expect a more user friendly Linux desktop.